Asylum of the Daleks (TV story)
Asylum of the Daleks 'is the first episode of the seventh series of ''Doctor Who. It was written by Steven Moffat, directed by Nick Hurran and featured Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor, Karen Gillan as Amy Pond and Arthur Darvill as Rory Williams. Overview To be added Synopsis The Doctor, along with Amy and Rory who are headed for divorce, are kidnapped by the Daleks. They find themselves before the Dalek Parliament and the Doctor is quite surprised when he learns why: they want him to save them. A ship has crashed on the one place they will not go - the Asylum, where mad Daleks are sent to spend the rest of their days. Once there, they are assisted by the only survivor of the crash, Oswin, who has been there for a year awaiting rescue and making soufflés to pass the time. Which leads the Doctor to ask the most important question of all: where does she get the milk? Plot On the ruins of Skaro, the Doctor arrives for a meeting with a woman named Darla who had contacted him with plea for help in rescuing her daughter Hannah from a Dalek concentration camp. He states definitively that nobody escapes the Dalek camps and notes how cold she is; a Dalek eyestalk suddenly sprouts from her forehead and a gunstick from the palm of her hand. The shoots the Doctor unconscious as a Dalek saucer flies in overhead, declaring "The Doctor is Acquired". On 21st Century Earth, Amy performs as a model for a photoshoot when her assistant tells her that her husband is here; she informs him she doesn't have a husband. She finds Rory in the dressing room brandishing divorce papers she needs to sign. Once she does, he gets up and leaves while Amy is tended to by her make-up artist who suddenly extends a Dalek eyestalk from her head and the Daleks proclaim that "Amelia Pond is Acquired". At the same time, Rory catches a bus and is caught the same way - "Rory Williams is Acquired". Amy and Rory wake up in a capsule in the middle of a Dalek fleet when the Doctor is brought in, escorted by two Daleks. The platform they are standing on rises into a giant chamber the Doctor identifies as the Parliament of the Daleks. He presents himself before the Daleks, expecting them to open fire on him; however, to his and his friends' surprise, they instead all start chanting "Save Us!" In an escape pod, a young woman named Oswin Oswald barricades the door of her craft from the Daleks and details into a voice recorder her year trapped there, after her crash. A party of Daleks starts banging on the door outside and Oswin plugs her ears to them. In the Dalek Parliament, the Doctor mentally draws up a battle plan while subconsciously notice that there is something amiss with his companions. The Dalek Prime Minister declares that they've arrived and calls the Doctor forth and asks him what he knows of the Dalek Asylum. From his knowledge, he explains the asylum to be a containment planet for all the Daleks driven mad or scarred from battle, a prospect that confuses him as the Daleks would just kill them. He is immediately sickened by the Prime Minister's declaration that their view of hatred is what they consider beauty. The floor opens up with a view of the Asylum beneath it; Darla explains that all the Daleks in there are all presumed to still be alive but are still armed and dangerous. They play a signal being detected from beneath the planet's surface and Carmen starts playing through the ship; the Doctor folds the signal back and gets in touch with Oswin on the surface. She explains she had been crew on the starship Alaska when she crashed on the planet and has been stranded alone for a year with the rest of her crew missing. The Daleks shut off the transmission and the Doctor insists that if a ship has managed to crash into the Asylum then the defenses are compromised giving the insane Daleks a window to escape. Since the shield stopping the Daleks from destroying the planet can only be turned off from inside, the Doctor suggests sending in a small squadron of Daleks but hilariously realises that they are all too scared to attempt it. Instead, the Daleks have the Doctor, Amy and Rory supplied with protective bracelets able to keep them from succumbing to the effect of the Asylum's nanocloud and launch them at the planet using a gravity beam. They are separated in the gravity beam and wind up in three different places. Amy is found by a man in a white coat who mistakes her for a rescue team. The Doctor wakes up next to a Dalek eyestalk emerging from the snow and Oswin contacts him through it, being able, to his surprise, to hack Dalek technology with almost negligible difficulty; he tries to scan for her and she states that she might have crashed somewhere underground. The signal break up as Amy finds the Doctor and the white-coated man, Harvey, directs them in the direction of the third beam. When the find where it had landed, they discover that Rory had fallen down a deep, black shaft when he'd landed. Below the surface, Rory wakes up in a dingy chamber full of inactive Daleks. Harvey takes the Doctor and Amy back to the hatch he was opening when they arrived, another section of the Alaksa. Inside, Harvey introduces them to his crew when the Doctor pulls back their hoods to reveal a group of desiccated corpses. Harvey is immediately convinced that they'd only spoken an hour ago before he suddenly remembers that he'd died outside, his body preserved by the cold and a Dalek eyestalk emerges from his forehead. The Doctor uses a fire extinguisher to force him into a storage unit and seals him in; he realises that the nanocloud Darla was talking about transforms all matter, living or dead, into Dalek puppets, hence the bracelets. Amy interrupts his flow and directs him to the fact that the corpses have started rising with eyestalks sticking out of their heads and they retreat into the cockpit; one of the puppets grabs Amy's arm in the process but the Doctor gets her free and seals the door behind them. Oswin contacts them through the comms and informs them of a ladder taking them below the surface; as they clear the hatch to the ladder, Amy asks what's happened between Amy and Rory since he last saw them and she insists it's not something that he can simply fix. Before they leave, the Doctor notices one of the puppets holding a bracelet and Amy notices that it's her's that they slipped off her wrist in the struggle earlier. In the tunnels below, Rory accidentally wakes up the mass of Daleks previously inactive there and Oswin points him to the safety of a corridor where there aren't any Daleks. The Doctor and Amy make their way down to him while the Doctor explains that the micromachines in the air will start changing Amy into a puppet with her mind before physical changes. While Oswin directs Rory to a teleport chamber, the Doctor gets in touch asking for a safe way around a room full of Daleks and a path to Rory's location when Amy, suffering from a sudden but short-lived bout of hallucination, opens the door and lets a Dalek out. The Dalek, unable to follow them, activates it's self destruct in a last-ditch effort to kill the Doctor, so he opens up it's casing and puts it into reverse, sending it screaming backwards into the chamber as it explodes, taking the remaining Daleks with it. Rory and Oswin hear the resulting explosion and Rory goes to investigate, finding the Doctor carrying an unconscious Amy. They bring her back to the chamber as Amy wakes up and the Doctor asks Oswin to drop the Asylum's forcefield after he boosts the power of the teleport so they can escape before the planet explodes; Oswin agrees as long as the Doctor comes and gets her to ensure that he takes her as well. The Doctor leaves Rory in charge of the teleport if the bombardment gets too much after the forcefield is dropped and before he goes to collect Oswin with provided directions, tells Amy to keep holding onto the love that the nanomachines are trying to take from her. While he's gone, Rory decides to remove his protective bracelet off and give it to Amy on the ground that the current state of their marriage to him makes it seem that he loves her more that she loves him. Amy furiously rebuffs the claim and tells him the real reason that their marriage fell apart is that she was rendered infertile by the events of Demons Run and thus can't give Rory the children he's wanted for a long time, so she let him go and gave him the chance to have them with somebody else. Nevertheless, Rory persists in trying to get his band on Amy when the notice she's already wearing one - the Doctor's. He'd slipped it onto her wrist when he left and Amy realises that he didn't tell them so that they'd have a catalyst to finally address their problems and work through them. The Doctor arrives at the Intensive Care, a section for all the battle-scarred Daleks who had survived encounters with him; as he tries to get into Oswin's chamber, the Daleks recognise the Doctor and break free of their chains, advancing on him menacingly. Just as they are about to quash him, they suddenly desist and Oswin confesses that she'd hacked into the Daleks' telepathic network, the Path Web and removed all memory of the Doctor from their minds. The Doctor thinks this feat simply impossible until the chamber door opens and he sees Oswin with his own eyes; he informs her that everything she thinks she's seeing inside her ship is a dream, an illusion she'd forced herself to have because the reality of what she was now was too terrible - she was a Dalek. Oswin insists that she's human but the Doctor explains that she may have been when she crashed but she was caught by the Daleks and, wanting to utilise her genius, they performed a full conversion on her. Devastated, Oswin's true memories start to reassert themselves and she advances on the Doctor, threatening to kill him. However, she instead starts sobbing and asks why the Daleks despise him so much. He admits that he wants to stop having to fight the Daleks and Oswin shuts off the force field, giving him the chance to escape. He thanks her and runs while she tells him to remember. As the Doctor makes his way back to the teleport, Amy finally comes to terms with her marriage with Rory and they share a kiss, getting so caught up in the moment that they fail to notice the Doctor return and he activates the teleport as the Asylum is blasted out of the sky. On the ship, the Daleks detect an incoming teleport from the Asylum and the Doctor emerges from the TARDIS to find, to his absolute shock and delight, that the Daleks have never heard of him. In her final moments, Oswin had done a total erasure of the Doctor from the Daleks' collective mind. As the Daleks around his all sit demanding "Doctor Who?", the Doctor vanishes back into the TARDIS and returns Amy and Rory home with their relationship restored. Inside the TARDIS, the Doctor whirls around the console room, repeating "Doctor Who?" to himself repeatedly as he launches for his next adventure. Cast * The Doctor - Matt Smith * Amy Pond - Karen Gillan * Rory Williams - Arthur Darvill * Oswin - Jenna-Louise Coleman * Darla - Anamaria Marinca * Cassandra - Naomi Ryan * Harvey - David Gyasi * Voice of the Daleks - Nicholas Briggs * Dalek 1 - Barnaby Edwards * Dalek 2 - Nicholas Pegg Crew To be added References To be added Story Notes To be added Continuity To be added Home video and audio releases To be added External Links * Official ''Asylum of the Daleks'' page on '''Doctor Who Website